Mastodon

“ Losantville, Randolph County.—Losantville is, according to Leverett (Monogr. U. S. Geol. Surv. LIII, plate VI) , on the Bloomington moraine of the Wisconsin. As indicated on the map, the drift is covered with silt formed in local ice-border pools. Hence the mastodon in question left his bones in a depression on the top of the Wisconsin drift-sheet, and later they were covered by a deposit of peat.
In Nautilus, volume IV, page 131, Elwood Pleas, of Dunreith, Indiana, gave a list of six species of mollusks found associated with the mastodon. All are yet living. ”

“ Arranging a double line of electric wires in a circle about the mastodon and themselves, they sat down and did justice to the meal, with appetites that might have dismayed the waiting throng. Whenever a snake's head came in contact with one wire, while his tail touched the other, he gave a spasmodic leap and fell back dead. If he happened to fall across the wires, he immediately began to sizzle, a cloud of smoke arose, and lie was reduced to ashes.
"Any time that we are short of mastodon or other good game," said Ayrault, "we need not hunger if we are not above grilled snake." ”

“ Had we seen a megatherium or a mylodon or a megalonyx crossing our path, or observed a mastodon pushing his bulky form through the dense underbrush; had we seen a screaming pterodactyl passing over our heads, or beheld a giant iguanodon floundering in the morass by the wayside, or browsing on the succulent crowns of the Mauritia flexuosa, we should have regarded it all as in perfect keeping with our environment. ”

“ They form patches rarely exceeding twenty feet in thickness, resting on white chalk. At their junction with the chalk there invariably intervenes a bed called the “Stone-bed,” composed of unrolled chalk-flints, commonly of large size, mingled with the remains of a land fauna comprising Mastodon arvernensis, Elephas meridionalis, and an extinct species of deer. The mastodon, which is a species characteristic of the Pliocene strata of Italy and France, is the most abundant fossil, and one not found in the Cromer forest before mentioned. ”

“ Huge animals of the mastodon family wandered through the forests of the infant world, and along the grassy shores of the ancient lake grazed the gentle oreodon, unmolested by the twang of the bow-string or crack of the hunter's rifle; man had not yet appeared upon the earth. ”

“ Human bones, too, in abundance, have been exhumed in a sufficiently well preserved state to afford a basis for various theories and speculations.
But of the mastodon, with which these dead Mound-Builders are supposed to have been acquainted, not a palpable trace remains. The tale of its existence is told by a single mound in Wisconsin, which the most ardent supporter of the mastodon theory must acknowledge to be far from a facsimile, and two carvings and an inscribed tablet, the three latter the finds of a single explorer. ”

“ We are apt to consider the mastodon as a creature of so distant a time in the unrecorded past, that man must necessarily have appeared much later upon the scene. The truth is, comparatively speaking, the creature so recently became extinct that, in all probability, our historic Indians were acquainted with it. ”

“ The chain of organic causation, to be perfect and complete, can not assume the mysterious origin of the mastodon. That stock must, in its turn, have originated in an ancestry less like the elephants than itself. It is not improbable that the evolutionist of the future will seek and find the mastodon ancestry in the dinotherium group, or in some nearly related forms. For, as we have seen, the dinotherium exhibits a structure which appears to relate the elephants to other and lower quadrupeds, such as the sea-cows and their neighbors. ”

“ Mastodon bones have been exhumed from peat beds in this country at a depth which, so far as is proved by the rate of deposition, implies that the animal may have been alive within five hundred years. The extinction of the mastodon, geologically speaking, was certainly a very recent event, and, as an antiquity of upwards of a thousand or more years has been assigned to some of the mounds, it is entirely within the possibilities that this animal was living at the time these were thrown up, granting even that the time of their erection has been overestimated. ”

“ Another extinct mammal besides the mammoth and Bison antiquus has been found in early sites—the mastodon. The animal is not typical of any particular time period, or associated with any special kind of projectile point. It would seem that people of early cultures in the eastern United States hunted this beast with a variety of stemmed projectile points until about 5,500 years ago. Mastodons occur at least five times in probable association with early man, according to Stephen Williams. ”

“ From the fact that stone arrow-heads have been discovered lying round the skeleton in America, and from stories told by the Indians, it seems likely that the mastodon was living in the New World, at any rate when the earliest men peopled the land ”

“ Individuals without lower tusks are regarded by him as females.
In Ward’s Natural Science Establishment, Rochester, New York, there is, or was, a lower jaw of a mastodon from Lagrange County.
The writer has received a photograph showing the right fore-leg, two ribs, two tusks, and a lower jaw of a mastodon found in 1884, in a swamp, 4 miles northwest of Lagrange. The remains were embedded in a clayey marl deposit, at a depth of from 4 to 10 feet. They are said to have been exhumed by Dr. H. M. Betts. The hindermost lower molar shows five crests and a heel. ”

“ The biggest specimen of Dinotherium, which was found in Roumania, was bigger than the largest Mastodon. But the Dinothere didn’t have the real emigration spirit. So far as we know, he never came to the New World.
“At last came the true American Mastodon, developed from the three-crested tooth type. He lived during the Age of Man. Primitive Man hunted the Mastodon and the Mammoth, and has even left pictures of the chase engraved on reindeer horn. When you stop to consider the crude [Pg 270] types of stone weapons that Man used at that time, it looks like long odds against the Man. ”

“ There is, however, nothing to necessitate us believing in an immense age for these remains. This is not to be considered a point against them, for there is no reason for supposing that the mastodon may not have lingered on to comparatively recent times, and that comparatively recent men may not have intercepted and destroyed helpless individuals. ”

“ Certain it is that, in the distant long ago of the great Ice age, the mastodon existed, and equally certain that with him lived that primitive man who fabricated the rude implements we have described. The bones of the animal and the bones and weapons of the man lie side by side, deep down in the gravels deposited by the floods from the melting ice-sheet. In February, 1885, I walked to and fro over the frozen Delaware, where it reaches a full mile in width, and saw at the time many horses and sleighs passing from shore to shore. ”

“ If this appendage is too long for the snout of any other known animal, it is certainly too short for the trunk of a mastodon. Still, so far as this one character goes, it is doubtless true that it is more suggestive of the mastodon than of any other animal. No hint is afforded of tusks, ears, or tail, and were it not for the snout the animal effigy might readily be called a bear, it nearly resembling in its general make-up many of the so-called bear mounds figured by Squier and Davis from this same county in Wisconsin. ”

“ Whether the American mastodon and megatherium, and the European mammoth and the woolly rhinoceros, and all the other huge Pleistocene mammalia, were saved at all, even in single couples—whether all the lesser mammalia which have survived could or could not be saved from drowning by the refuge afforded in a single vessel these are questions which do not seem to have been even thought of. ”

“ One of the above species of Mastodon (Mast. Cordillerarum) was established by Cuvier [1] on remains discovered by Humboldt, in Quito, near the volcanic mountain, called Imbaburra, at an elevation of 1200 toises above the level of the sea; and likewise at the Cordilleras of Chiquitos, near Santa Cruz de la Sierra, a locality which is near the centre of South America. A second species (Mastodon Humboldtii, Cuv. [2] ) is indicated by molar teeth, stated to have been discovered by the same philosophic traveller, in Chile, near the city of Concepcion. ”

“ But it would be rash to assume from the partial evidence yet obtained, that the juxtaposition of flint arrow-heads with the mastodon of Missouri, the pottery with bones and tusk of the same animal in the post-pleiocene of South Carolina, the human bones in the rich ossiferous caverns of the Brazils, or the flint implements, and human remains recovered from Californian and other auriferous drifts, unquestionably prove the existence of man on the American continent contemporaneously with the fossil elephant or the mastodon. ”

“ If it can safely be assumed that an animal effigy without tusks, without ears, and without a tail was really intended to represent a mastodon, it would be stretching imagination but a step farther to call all the large-bodied, heavy-limbed animal effigies hitherto named bears, mastodons, attributing the lack of trunks, as well as ears, tusks, and tails, to inattention to slight details on the part of the mound artist. ”

“ From the remarkable discoveries of MM. Lund and Clausen, it appears that some of the species found in the Pampas inhabited the highlands of Brazil: the Mastodon Andium is embedded at great heights in the Cordillera from north of the equator to at least as far south as Tarija (Humboldt states that the Mastodon has been discovered in New Granada: it has been found in Quito. When at Lima, I saw a tooth of a Mastodon in the possession of Don M. Rivero, found at Playa Chica on the Maranon, near the Guallaga. Every one has heard of the numerous remains of Mastodon in Bolivia.) ”

“ The skull is a large one. The width across the rear is 760 mm.
6. Dunnville, Haldimand County.—In 1869 (Geol. Mag. London, dec. 1, vol. VI, pp. 38, 39) , Dr. J. W. Dawson gave an account of the finding of a mastodon, in 1868, at the place named, situated at the east end of Lake Erie. When he reached the place a large part of the animal had disappeared, especially the tusks. He found 7 teeth, a few vertebræ, a few fragments of ribs, and part of the right ramus of the lower jaw. These remains were buried in a swamp, partly embedded in a layer of fine sand. ”

“ Even in America, however, that period lies far beyond the reach of human tradition,—a fact borne out by the pseudo-traditions retailed by the aborigines regarding the mastodon. By none of at least the higher naturalists has there been a doubt entertained respecting its herbivorous character; and the discovery of late years of the stomach of an individual charged with decayed herbage and fragments of the succulent branches of trees, some of them of existing species, has demonstrated the solidity of the reasonings founded on its general structure and aspect. ”

“ His life, and the feelings by which it was regulated, are well worth examining, although we fear he will find but few imitators in these days, and is more likely, in a utilitarian and money-seeking age, to be classed with the mammoth and mastodon, as a species of existence never again to be seen in this world. ”

“ Bones of the mastodon, equal in size to those of the Ohio, a grinder 1612 inches in circumference, a humerus, measuring 25 inches round the condyles, with several [p357] grinders and bones of younger individuals, and fragments of tusks: fossil molares of the rhinoceros, resembling two species of a genus named by Cuvier Anthracotherium: bones like an animal of the horse kind: remains of crocodiles, supposed to be the gavial, or long-nosed alligator of the Ganges, (not now known in the rivers of Ava.) ”

“ It has been mentioned that the mastodon and mammoth seem to have attained their meridian toward the close of the tertiary epoch, and that a few may have lived even in the current era; but it is more probable that the commencement of existing conditions was the proximate cause of their extinction, and that not a solitary specimen ever lived to be the contemporary of man. ”

“ In the Pier-case (No. 38) , near the Mastodon americanus, may be seen fifteen heads and jaws, together with other parts of the skeleton, mostly obtained from the same locality, but some of them came from the “Big Bone Lick,” Kentucky.
A fine specimen, obtained from a marsh near Newburgh, by Dr. Warren, measured eleven feet in height, and seventeen in length, while the tusks were nearly ten feet long, not including the portion in the long sockets of the cranium. Twenty-six species of Mastodon are known. ”

“ The Edentates, in their southern migration, were probably accompanied by the horse, tapir, and rhinoceros, although no remains of the last have yet been found south of Mexico. The mastodon, elephant, llama, deer, peccary, and other mammals, followed the same path. Why the mastodon, elephant, rhinoceros, and especially the horse, should have been selected with the huge Edentates for extinction, and the other Ungulates left, is at present a mystery, which their somewhat larger size hardly explains. ”

“ New plants will be found, mountains of precious ore, a vast wealth of timber and water-power, and, it may be, strange creatures hitherto unknown to science.
It is believed by many that the mastodon, whose skeleton rears itself high above the elephant’s, in our museums, is not entirely extinct, but actually roams the tangled thickets of inner Alaska. ”